Published 4:00 am, Sunday, November 14, 2010

Irrepressible

The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford

By Leslie Brody

(Counterpoint; 405 pages, $28)

Perhaps the best book ever published about investigative journalism carries the title "Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking." The author is Jessica Mitford, who settled in the Bay Area during World War II after an unlikely journey and remained an Oakland/San Francisco mainstay until her death in 1996.

The unlikely journey began with Mitford's birth, in 1917, into a controversial, highly visible family of British nobility. She ran away from home as a teenager; married Esmond Romilly, an equally young man and international adventurer who died in World War II combat after they brought a child into the world; struggled to reconcile her aristocratic birthright with her communist beliefs; found a life partner in second husband Robert Treuhaft, who became a Bay Area lawyer for the dispossessed and wrongfully accused; and, well into middle age, discovered her calling as a writer with a low threshold of outrage and a rapier wit.

For those who have not read Mitford's books and magazine features, it might be difficult to imagine laughing uproariously at exposés of the funeral industry, the prison establishment and other depressing topics, but Mitford expressed the disturbing facts with such irreverence that suppressing laughter proved impossible for me. She could have succeeded as a stand-up comedian - and did, at private social gatherings.

Making Mitford come alive and seem fresh on the pages of a book is difficult, partly because humor is so hard to capture, partly because so much has been published by previous profilers about Mitford and her fractious British sisters (especially "The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters"), partly because Mitford's oldest sister, Nancy, wrote so much best-selling fiction and nonfiction about the family, partly because Jessica Mitford published stunning memoirs of her own ("A Fine Old Conflict" plus "Hons and Rebels").

Defying the odds, Leslie Brody has produced an excellent biography. A University of Redlands professor, Brody has chosen information judiciously - a biography of Mitford easily could run double the number of pages - and presented it charmingly, even when the episodes are depressing. Brody is an unusual stylist - especially for an academic - in that she creates unexpected, original strings of words much like Mitford herself did. Consider Brody's wisely chosen opening to the biography: "Soon after Jessica Mitford moved with her family to Swinbrook House in Oxfordshire, she began to plot her escape from it. She was twelve years old, already an autodidact well aware of world events and with a practical sense concerning certain economic currents. That year - it was 1929 - she wrote a letter to her family's London bank, requesting that a new kind of account be opened on her behalf, and she provided specifications."

Mitford called it her "Running Away Account," and the bank complied. A Mitford biography understandably ranges across oceans. But it is also an intensely Bay Area-centric book, and local residents seem certain to lose themselves in descriptions of the Mitford-Treuhaft residences, exclusive inclusive (crossing racial and class line) social events at those homes, and more fraught passages about the bad old days, passages not only about the risk-taking but also about her heroic husband: "Soon after opening his own East Bay law practice, Bob had a full schedule of cases defending black youths against police brutality. In those first postwar years, all the Oakland police were white. A lot of police officers and prison guards had migrated from the rural South during the war, and many of them held the mind set that no matter who or why, a white man was always superior. Oakland gained a reputation for being a Western interpretation of a Jim Crow town. Bob's work gave him a front-row seat witnessing the abuse of power."

Mitford and Treuhaft faced their demons: She drank too much alcohol and smoked too many cigarettes, he fell into at least one extramarital sexual affair, and they struggled to cope with the death of their 10-year-old son Nicky, killed when a speeding bus hit his bicycle as he delivered newspapers. But Decca (Jessica's primary nickname among many) and Bob endured, always striving to make the world a better place. Brody has made the world a better place by telling their saga so skillfully.

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